Digital video cameras are useful in both consumer and professional contexts. Generally, digital video cameras can capture multiple sequential frames (e.g., a video sequence) of a subject or scene. The captured video sequence may then be transferred to a computer system for display or stored in a storage device, among other actions.
Video data is often streamed over a communications network, such as the Internet. For example, users can view streamed trailer videos from upcoming movies through many different Web sites. However, these streamed videos often have a low spatial frequency of video information in each frame, in large part because of bandwidth limitations in the communications channel.
Some approaches for enhancing spatial frequency of an image or video sequence include merely interpolating between low resolution pixels or groups of pixels to infer higher resolution pixels between them and, alternatively, filtering the image data to enhance the higher frequency information along edges in the image. However, interpolating merely yields a higher resolution image without providing the higher frequency image data needed to improve image sharpness. In contrast, while the filtering approach can improve sharpness, it can also amplify noise in the image, diminishing the overall apparent improvement in the higher resolution image, especially in a video sequence.